When you travel solo a number of things happen to you. The first three or four hours is tough. You sit in your room and try and build the strength and the facade that will appear when you walk outside the doors hoping and wishing other people think you know what you are doing. You start with small excursions. The shop to the corner, the pool. Whatever you can take just to get you out the door. While my excursions are not quite solo it’s a mindset I have to force myself into over the next week. Nobody wants to be that person you travel with that just doesn’t, pardon my french, fuck off.
For the first few days travelling with someone new is alway a little scary. You make compromises you never would and hold your tongue just to keep the peace. You see each other in the most stressful part of a holiday and like all travel buddies, you know no one else so you take it out on them. Travelling with a boy is even scarier. He doesn’t want to know about when I need to wee, how funny that ladies mullet looked in her tight white pants (even if she was 60 something with a corkscrew perm on top and with flowing locks down her back.) He doesn’t care that I find the outside of the car window just as fascinating as the buttons on the new rental car’s dashboard. He cares that I know my left my right, that I can pre empt the lady on the sat nav and that we’ve been fed adequately.
Quiet time is a new institution I am trying to work on. Apparently there’s no need to fill every second of the day with conversation. I am a talker. I talk a lot. I listen a lot too but mostly I like to talk. And when we are somewhere new I like to talk about it all a little bit more. But travelling with a boy for all of three days has taught me a few things…
1. It’s ok to not talk. It doesn’t mean the other person is mad at you and while I find the silences sometimes awkward, it doesn’t mean I should fill them with needless dribble.
2. Stress is when we see each other as we actually are. Not as the people we present to the outside all of the other times. I knew this one but I don’t think I actually really knew what this would be like. If at the end of the day you still don’t think they are a total ass then it’s probably ok.
3. There comes a time when you have to remember that you are just you. Regardless of all of your faults (my faults) when you are on the road there is no other option but to fall into your state of being. All of the good bits and all of the bad bits. And if the person that you’re travelling with doesn’t like that – well then you can always pick up another room mate on the road.
Now I am not about to ditch my current travelling partner. We’ve been on the road three days and he still possess all of the qualities I liked about him before we left. He is still generous, kind, funny (don’t tell him I said that), of sound mind, but I think in the last three days we’ve both realised we still have a lot to learn about each other. So I sent him away today. Well not really, he’s left to the next destination early while I do a number of lame touristy things in the next day and a half on my own. So here I sit, in a bar called Lulu’s on Waikiki beach with my second sangria on the way, a plate of fried egg rolls with kalua pork (tastes much better than it sounds) writing to you after 8pm on a Friday night.
They’ve put me at the rail. The strip around the edge of the bar where it looks less bad than at a table eating on your own. There are couples on either side and I do look a little bit like a lame arse typing away on my iPad while these people enjoy their time together. But little excursions today make it feel much more liberating in person that what it sounds in text. On little excursions today I met a couple of locals by the hotel pool. She works here at Lulu’s and invited me to come up for dinner and drinks. They’ve been in Hawaii for 22 years combined and love it. Are about to embark on their own trans Atlantic adventures. I met two old ladies from NSW who asked me to take their picture. We got to chat about the all the vials of Waikiki beach – the homeless, the Japanese tourist population and the Texan accent. There was Nancy and Ray at the hotel bar who have lived in Hawaii for 20 something years who mow lawns for a living and play lawn bowls on a green built by Australians and then there was the 82 year old Dutch man who asked me for the time on the beach today. He moved to Canada when he was 27 where he married his wife. They had an apartment here in Hawaii and came every year for holidays. She recently passed away and thought he would make one more trip before he couldn’t do it anymore. The man said that two weeks ago he was doing an ice walk in the mountains of Canada and today he gets to sun himself on Waikiki beach. I don’t know how long I can do this he says. But you can’t stop living.
He was right. You can’t stop living. Things may not work themselves out the way you thought but you never know, it could be even better. I am positive as a travelling duo we’ll find our feet (and our united voice – our travel blog still a work in progress…) and it may just take a night of full strength mai tais to work out the pecking order but if any of the people I met today have taught me anything, it’s to have another drink (my sangria just arrived) and don’t stop saying yes. Being in the world and not in my room can only be the start of something new. “Oh the people she will meet and the places she will go…”
life in big frilly knickers 